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Authors: Alexander Egyed,
Wuwei Shen, and Kun Wang
Models
provide an alternative perspective for the understanding of a software
system. However, models reflect the state of the system at the time of their
creation (or last updating) but they do not reflect intermediate changes
during the system’s evolution. Depicting perspectives without showing changes
is like watching a movie through a small set of still pictures (i.e., no
motion). This paper demonstrates this problem on an existing technique for
the automated simplification (abstraction) of class diagrams. We will show
that it is computationally feasible to maintain a set of abstract
perspectives of a class structure such that evolutionary changes to the class
structure are instantly perceived through its perspectives. For developers,
this provides the ability to understand changes to systems from the modeling
perspectives they care about. It also gives the developers the confidence
that their modeling perspectives re-main up-to-date with the system even
while the system evolves.
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